Regular reader Linda asked a very good question on my post about internal linking and relevance…
Hi Bob
Would love to follow your advice- but how time consuming would this be when you are running several similar sites?
On which I replied…
Thanks for the comment Linda, It could be done retroactively but there is no reason why it can’t be done as you go along. Remember you are only linking similar posts together. So you could just link posts about something you are trying promote such as a service or a product. You don’t have to do every post.
In fact there are two ways to handle this situation, depending on previous posts.
Linking to an existing page
When linking for relevance, it is good practice to link to a page that acts as an index. The first level of pages link back to it (this is explained in my post about relevance). You may well have a blog post that can act as the index and it’s just a matter of identifying the first level pages. WordPress can make this easier as when adding links, you can search through the list of previous posts. That feature will setup each link with the ’title’ tag filled, also very good for SEO.
Creating a new index page
Search through existing posts, make notes of those that are on a common theme. Especially ones that extend previous posts. Create a new post that discusses the common theme, like an introduction to the topic. One helpful way is to write small sections, breaking down the overall theme. Each sub section can then link out to the first level pages.
Is this really a big task?
Initially it seems like a big job but really all you are doing is creating or using a post to link together many others. How long it takes depends on the theme and how many pages you choose to link.
